Dying Yarn

I'm finding that I really enjoy dying yarn.  If I could afford it, I think I'd try my hand at selling the yarn I dye.  However, it's not a cheap hobby, which is why I haven't done it much.  I'm sure I'd make my money back and more, but getting started is half the battle.  Anyway, on to this dying adventure.

This time, I used a method that involved freezing Kool-Aid into ice cubes prior to applying the color to the yarn.  These ice trays are new, and I discovered that there is such a thing as "too full" if I'm planning to stack the trays.

This led to me having to handle the cubes more than I had planned, which led to staining my fingers.

Thankfully, this only took a couple of days to fade completely.  Moving on - as usual, I soaked the yarn for several hours in water that had a few glugs of vinegar in it.  I just eyeball it.

Once it had soaked I put it into a roasting pan and scattered the color cubes over the top of the yarn.

Then it went into the oven for 2 hours.

When it came out, it wasn't nearly as dark as I was expecting or hoping for it to be.  Therefore, I decided to give it another run through the system.  I got more Kool-Aid and doubled the concentration of Kool-Aid to water.  I also moved the yarn from the large roasting pan to a smaller glass pan.

Rather than freeze this batch of dye, I just poured it over the yarn in the pan.  It made for a very full pan of yarn, so I had to be very careful when it came to transporting this across my kitchen.  Grape Kool-Aid stains.

Back into the oven it went for another hour and thirty minutes, after which the color was much darker overall.  I checked to be sure that the water was now clear, then gave it a dunk in the sink to cool/rinse.

Then it was onto the drying rack in the bathtub.  Best place for something to drip dry - especially something that you can't wring out for fear of damaging it (wringing wet wool yarn can cause felting, which is great when you want it but terrible when you don't - and I don't, at least not for this).

The next day, it was dry and I twisted it into a hank.  Finished!!

Debating a New Diet

This morning's visit to the scale was rather depressing.  So much so that I'm not even willing to post the number on my blog, and I'm usually pretty open about the number.  I feel that publishing the number gives people a way to see how things are going.  Well, today I'm going to leave it at, "They're not going well."

I recently read something about the concept of intermittent fasting, and I'm thinking of giving it a try.  There is some deprivation involved (after all, no diet is without it), but it's not as restrictive as most.  I'm still trying to decide which version of the diet I'm going to try.  There is one where calories are restricted, and there is one where time is restricted (as in, you only eat within a certain time frame, usually 8 hours in the middle of your day).

Yes, I'm still here.

Well, it's been a year since I posted, and much has changed while everything seems the same.  I'm going to get back into blogging slowly, so today's is a crafty post.

I'm working on a Crochet-A-Long (CAL) on Ravelry.  We're making blankets/afghans that are crazy quilts of colors and patterns.  Each person's is inspired by a single pattern, but each of us is making a very different blanket.  Here is the beginning of mine:

I started with 5 rows of hdc:

I rolled it up and it made a nice little roll (little being relative - it is about 5 inches across at the longest point).  This roll makes it easier to transport and less likely to tangle among itself.  It's approximately 10 feet long.

Next I did a chevron section.  It went well in the main pattern section, but the edges came out a little wonky.  There will be more chevron sections, so hopefully I can figure out my edging by then.

Here's a look at the edge.  Ideally, I want the greens to be equal and the purple to be no larger than its role in the rest of the segment.  Obviously, that didn't happen in this case, but it didn't bother me enough to make me pull it out and start over.

As you can see in the edge photo, I've moved on from that chevron pattern to another section of hdc.  I'm going to be putting 4-row hdc spacer sections between each of the stitch pattern sections.  Some stitch pattern sections will be wider than others, and I hope to bust a lot of stash with this blanket.